Bridging The Gap: From Infamous 2 To Second Son

Players overwhelmingly chose to play through Infamous 2’s good ending. During this now-canonical ending, Cole defeats a powerful, destruction-crazed Conduit known as the Beast and then sets off a genetic bomb called the Ray Field Inhibitor (RFI), which not only kills Cole but destroys all the Conduit genes around the world, thereby ridding the world of the Conduit “plague.”

While this ending seemed fairly conclusive, the RFI device wasn’t as thorough as players were initially led to believe. According to Sucker Punch, Conduits who were further away from the RFI’s blast radius weren’t completely “cured,” so there are still a number of less-powerful Conduits and Conduits who didn’t know they had powers scattered across the globe.

Even if the RFI wasn’t as far-reaching as it could have been, the events of the first two Infamous games definitely left their mark on the world. A culture of fear sprang up, and the general population felt fragile with the knowledge that a select few held the power of an entire army at their fingertips. Someone had to step up and make sure that these Conduits didn’t have the opportunity to use their powers for destructive purposes ever again.

“In Infamous 1 and 2, it hit the fan,” says Fox. “The human population got freaked out by all the deaths. As a result, this agency called the DUP – Department of Unified Protection – was born. What they do is go out and round up anyone with superpowers and they put them in detention centers for the own protection, but really they’re doing it to protect the common man.”

While those with superhuman powers have traditionally been called Conduits, the DUP rebranded them as Bioterrorists. Whenever there is a Bioterrorist outbreak, the DUP swarms into a city, locks it down, and sets up checkpoints on every block. Everyone who lives in that city has to come through and put their finger on a scanner and prove they don’t have special powers.

“They take a city and turn it into a giant airport,” explains Fox.

The story of Infamous Second Son picks up after seven years of DUP operation, when a new character named Delsin discovers that he has powers during a Conduit outbreak near Seattle. To learn more about Second Son’s protagonist and his story, check out our character profile on Delsin.

And be sure to check out our Second Son hub for more information on Sucker Punch’s upcoming PlayStation 4 title.